A Potentially Entertaining Happenstance

It's interesting to see that, in the wake of the release of the final election results and Labour's apparent achievement of victory due to National's loss of a seat, it has now been reported that the Labour Party is considering filing a petition against ACT's Rodney Hide, accusing him of over-spending in his campaign to win the Epsom electorate seat. According to Labour's calculations, Rodney exceeded the twenty thousand dollar budget that candidates are legally permitted to put towards their campaigns. An e-mail of which Labour Party president Mike Williams took receipt -- and which was also destined for thousands of ACT voters -- appeared to be a request for financial aid from Rodney, and this has also, unsurprisingly, raised suspicions.

A particularly notable aspect of this emergence is that neither Labour, nor the left of Parliament, would actually receive any gain if Rodney did happen to be made to stand down from his electorate seat. Such a happening would result in a by-election in Epsom that would almost certainly result in the National candidate for the electorate, Richard Worth, taking Rodney's place in the House. The right would maintain the same number of seats that it possesses now, with the only difference to the whole political climate being that raucous Rodney would no longer be there, undoubtedly leading to none-too-infrequent instances of eery silence. Also odd is that despite the fact that National are the party which truly have something to gain out of Rodney's potential demise, Labour are the ones making the effort to bring the hammer of electoral justice down on top of him.

Today it has also been reported that Labour may have offered Winston Peters a ministerial position in the interests of solidifying his support for a Labour government. This doesn't come as a surprise to me at all. In fact, it was something that was outright predictable. Winston is such an individual who can be consistently expected to fish for any influence he can get, as reflected in Helen's comment during the leaders debate on TVOne -- "I think Winston's the only one who's got his hand up for that" -- provided on the tongue-in-cheek brief diversionary topic of "job sharing" that was initiated by Mark Sainsbury.

However, the aspect of today's report that I found intriguing was that, in a Herald article, the author suggested that the ministerial positions Winston was most likely to be keen for are Attorney-General or Minister of Economic Development. I had quite seriously been of the expectation that he would be after Minister of Immigration. Indeed, I had even prepared myself somewhat -- as much as one can -- for the event of Labour offering him the position of Deputy Prime Minister. To me, the final results looked that hard to make a government out of that I was expecting some serious emergency manoeuvres to be made by the government post-election. Perhaps it turns out that I don't know Winston's character as well as I had thought.

Provided the coming coalition negotiations go well, perhaps the government will actually be formed and in action within the next couple of weeks. There is no need for me to reiterate how heinous a dynamic jigsaw this all is for Helen to piece together, but I've just done it anyway. The progress of the formation of the government isn't helped by the manner in which many of the minor parties have, in my eyes, horsed around to a noticeable degree in the past week since the final results were released. I seem to recall Pita Sharples of the Maori Party providing a "guarantee," during a televised debate, that if either of the major parties were to approach his party with a coalition deal, they would give an official reply within six days. That certainly hasn't happened by the looks of how things stand at the moment. The Maori Party, in keeping with being a democratic organisation representating the Maori people, are hosting hui around the country to let members voice their opinions as to whether the party should stand by Labour or not, and has said that its position won't be confirmed until Monday. Despite the fact that this is not in keeping with Pita's promise, the philosophy behind the party's current activities is thoroughly admirable.